


Euthanasia

by goodloser



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Bugs & Insects, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Eye Trauma, Gen, Gore, Horror, Implied/Referenced Animal Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:22:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22468576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodloser/pseuds/goodloser
Summary: **NOTE!** The archive warnings are for mention of child pornography and animal death, as well as a description of graphic violence. The pornography and animal death contains no detail but it could still be very triggering. Heavy warning for eye trauma as well. This is a horror fic aimed to be canon-typical in terms of content but it does mention some very sensitive topics.Fan statement; regarding a 'cursed video' uploaded publicly to the Internet. Statement given the first of March, 2011.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	Euthanasia

**Author's Note:**

> i hate having to add those archive warnings but like i also really don't want to trigger anyone w/ mention of this stuff so you go
> 
> this is a real job and it's fucked up that people have to do this

Statement of Salman Bailey regarding a 'cursed video' uploaded publicly to the Internet. Statement given the first of March, 2011. Statement as read by Jonathan Simms, Head Archivist of the Magnus Archives on the seventeenth of September, 2016.

Statement begins. 

Thank you for doing this for me. I must admit I'm not as eloquent as I used to be, though I suppose I never really was in the first place. This is why I graduated from King's College with a degree in IT, Data Analysis. I didn't think it would land me in a job straight out of university, but it did, and I was successfully employed at a… rather famous website which publishes videos I will refuse to name. I don't need Data Protection Acts thrown at me, after all, but I think by the end of this it'll be clear which one I'm referring to. 

I did start in data analysis as a desktop monkey, running calculations on ad views, click-throughs, dreary things like that. And three years ago, I suppose I was sound enough that they 'promoted' me. I was a content reviewer per my official title, and I was offered a lucrative salary with fifty days holiday every year. 

The 'content reviewers' for this website deserved every one of those holidays. It was… harrowing, I can say, although not physically. The amount of content uploaded to this website was simply so vast, and I was forced to watch and report on every single video flagged for inspection. 

I understand it's not the hardest job in the world, it's no getting my legs blown off in Iraq, but it's not fine work. The stream of video was just… too much. To comprehend, to see. I suppose you being an, an archivist must understand a little of what I'm describing. It was simply too much for me or my team to handle. I have — again, I apologise for the ministrations. I know you've probably seen worse, my apologies. I'm just not cut from the same cloth. 

There are things happening, terrible things across the world and we only know a fraction of them, many of them recorded for pleasures that give me pause even now, even after the damned video. The most — the most 'popular' were images of children. They weren't all pornographic, but far, far too many of them were. Shared between accounts that clearly weren't parents, poor masquerades of people who _should_ be in possession of them. This specific department of the company had a high turnover rate. I stayed, through it all perhaps I could help to save someone, but the videos would just keep coming and coming. And even then I almost prefer them to the cursed video. Or I do, perhaps, one last act of selfishness so graciously afforded to me. 

Of course there was others, too. Terrorist execution videos were a bit of a modern-day hit that only rose in the number of uploads. Animal videos were sort of big too, something I could never understand, never any of this nonsense. Then there were the generic gore films, 'films' that should all right be deleted because they were _court evidence_ , yet from the bowels of the web or Tor or what fucking ever they festered and bred like flies down the sink. We didn't get repeat videos as often as I would've liked. 

And then after all that was the fucking video. 

It was an innocuous seeming file, a man's face on an empty room superimposed with red I'd liken to the Rivers of the Styx if you'd let me be so dramatic. It had a generic file name, a string of numbers hastily tapped out after decryption and uploaded from an IP in Eastern Europe, Estonia I believe and no doubt a VPN. It had little flags.

It was simply a video. Ten seconds of the man standing, wavering, eyeing you down from the screen. Ten seconds and it was over. Ten seconds you can't undo, and which I can't undo. The music was jarring; electronic, yet corrupted, like a breakcore with no rhythm or rhyme and it sets my teeth on edge now to even think about it. 

It was odd, yes, but not in violation of the site's video policies, so I left it up and moved on. The packages came then. 

First a neat matchbox, delivered personally to my desk. It was a matchbox of dried blood and dead flies; a disgusting gift from someone angry I'd reported his paedo ring or something. I ignored it. I'd already seen worse things during my time there. 

The second package came after I had rewatched the video several times; it cropped up repeatedly, uploaded from different servers across the world. The second package was a small picnic cooler lined in a box with ice — kept fresh. It was filled with eyes, with human ones. Despite the best efforts of the courier, the eyes were eggs, swarming with life — new maggots swelled in the white flesh bellow. Eyes — God knows how they kept their shape, how they made it so far into the company. We had to close that day. Health hazard. 

The packages did not stop coming. They were all eyes. Eyes plucked fresh from someone's head; soft glistening nubs of liquid you could pick up and slip between teeth if not for the way they were infested. They were all infested. 

And the hallucinations started. Of course. I was deleting the videos by this point, I had no real basis other than one grotesque caption reading 'this video is cursed lol you will rip out your eyes' but I think by then I'd watched too many. I'd feel the maggots and the blowflies reflected in my eyes, not saw but I _felt_ them slithering in between my corneas. And they were feeding. They were going to eat through my eyes and into my brain. One day fresh new flies, fat and hairy, would burst from my head from the cursed video and my ears would rattle with the infernal noise of grinding, of buzzing, of the thuds of heavy bodies dropping from my skull. 

By that point the others at the office were also receiving packages, that video showing up in their streams, never ending. I had a nightmare of wading through eyes too crushed by walk to be recognisable as eyes anymore but I knew. I was more intimate with the gelatin of an eye then any person should be. 

I did it. I had to, because I knew they were there. In one night laid in bed in a frenzy I begun to tear at them. I had to remove the worms, and bar that the eyes pregnant with the eggs within. I gave up, of course, and in the end I pulled both of them out with my bare fingers. Just scooped them out underneath the lids. I screamed and out of my mouth came that grinding, jittering beat of the music as frenetic as the crawl of a fly across soft skin. 

They laid off most of the employees. Hush money, of course. In fact, I believe the office shut down for a few months citing bug infestations. But the video is still out there. It will always be out there. A ticking bomb; a warhead set into a time capsule because I dread to think whatever could happen if it was broadcast to people not looking for it. 

They are training AI to do the content review work, but I believe they also have mandatory on-site therapists, too.

Statement ends. 

It's disconcerting to think of things spreading via new frontiers like the Internet, evolving at such a speed as to leave us in the dust. 

But I must admit, tales of haunted videos strikes me as _very_ 90s horror. Not my sort of film, really. 

Unfortunately the easily conformable details are with us. Mr. Bailey indeed worked at the Facebook office in Oxford Street, from 2006 to 2011, when he was among 14 other team members laid off from work with hopefully due compensation. As indeed did the office itself shut for two months in 2011, after health concerns due to an infestation of blowflies. 

Mr. Bailey was hospitalised following a self-inflicted enucleation. Following him was a string of similar incidents, prompting news websites to run the circuit of what they predicted was anything from a new online cult to a serial assaulter. 

Tim found the police records regarding the eyes. A harassment claim, they'd written, despite the fact the eyes were verifiably human and there were well over two hundred.

No real trace of the video has been found, other than an audio file of the alleged background music Sasha managed to dig up, and which I will append at the end of this tape. Although I do doubt the existence of such a video (posing too many questions, too many whos and hows) and I find it far more likely this experience is a mass company hysteria brought on by postal harassment, I can't say I'm sad it hasn't resurfaced.


End file.
